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Melania Trump promoted her recent memoir, “Melania,” with a series of glossy and cryptic promotional videos stating the desire “to share my perspective: the truth.” But what does the self-titled memoir reveal to us about the often inscrutable former first lady? The bookish Opinion columnists Carlos Lozada and Pamela Paul discuss what they learned — and often, what they did not — from her work.
Below is a lightly edited transcript of the audio piece. To listen to this piece, click the play button above.
Carlos Lozada: Hi, I’m Carlos Lozada. I’m a New York Times Opinion columnist and co-host of the “Matter of Opinion” podcast. I am delighted to be joined by my friend and fellow columnist Pamela Paul.
Pamela Paul: Hey, Carlos.
Lozada: Good to see you, Pamela.
Paul: Good to be here.
Lozada: Pamela and I often just sit around and talk about books. So that’s what we’re going to do today. In a prior life, I was a book critic at The Washington Post. Pamela used to run The New York Times Book Review. So this is kind of the thing that we enjoy doing. And we both just read Melania Trump’s new memoir.
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It is just titled “Melania.”
Advertisement: “I believe it is important to share my perspective: the truth.”
And it’s this all-black dust jacket, just one word — Melania — in white and just one blurb on the back from, you guessed it, Donald Trump. It’s a pretty conventional memoir, in terms of what it covers. It’s Melania Trump’s childhood, her modeling career, her move to New York, her marriage to Donald Trump and then a somewhat selective reading of her experiences as a political wife, as the first lady and watching Donald Trump’s career.
But, Pamela, what did you make of the book?
Paul: It’s funny that you say that it’s like a conventional memoir, because I felt like it was barely a book. It’s a book-adjacent object, but it’s not actually a book. [Lozada laughs.]
Even the presentation of it, it’s with the one blurb and with the bio, which is, “Melania Trump is a former first lady of the United States, successful businessperson and former international fashion model. She resides in Palm Beach, Fla., with her family.” There’s no chance that Melania Trump wrote this, but we have no sign of who the ghostwriter is. I have an idea that it was written by someone who worked for a long time in fashion P.R. or marketing, maybe someone who spent some time writing captions for, like, Harper’s Bazaar magazine —
Lozada: That is incredibly specific.
Paul: — that it was then read by a Trump loyalist who was like: Insert political statement here. And despite all of that, what I think of as group effort, the style is sort of like a fifth- or seventh-grade girl writing Sidney Sheldon fan fiction. I thought a lot about the prose of this book, which was kind of remarkable. I know people are interested in the content, but to my mind, it’s almost contentless.
Lozada: When I said it feels like a conventional memoir, I meant that it feels like a conventional memoir in terms of the arc of what is ostensibly covered. Like childhood, early adulthood, forays into her career, then meeting Donald and then political life. It hits the beats you would imagine it to hit, but it’s one of the rare political memoirs where I feel that at the end I really don’t know more about the subject than I knew to begin with.
Paul: I actually got a sense of who she is as a person, and I think that is an extremely superficial, politically disengaged human being, the last kind of person who you would think of as a political wife.
You know what she struck me as? Did you see “White Lotus,” the second season?
Lozada: Yes, I did. I saw them both.
Paul: She was like the Daphne character [Lozada laughs] in Season 2, portrayed by Meghann Fahy, where she’s sort of like: I don’t really follow politics. I feel like everything’s kind of good. That is Melania Trump.
She is just really interested in nice cars and nice clothing. You hear more about what she wore to every political event than you do about the event itself.
Lozada: I’m struck by how small her world is.
Paul: Yes.
Lozada: The only people that she seems close to are her parents; her sister, who kind of disappears after the early portions of the book; and then Donald and, of course, their son, Barron, to whom she seems quite devoted. But even when she describes these characters, it is in ways that you really get almost nothing about them. It’s like a series of adjectives and descriptions.
Like her mom: boundless creativity, impeccable taste and confidence, epitome of elegance, quiet strength, firm devotion. The father, he’s “confident, industrious, outgoing.” These are not people, right? These are actual characters.
Paul: It’s all superlative adjectives. It is all tell and not show. So this is the way she talks about herself — and I just want to say I have never heard a single human being describe themselves in this way: “I possessed a keen curiosity and diligent work ethic. I had a genuine passion for learning. As a hard worker, I was always striving for the best. My childhood experiences shaped me into a disciplined, ambitious individual who values hard work, dedication and self-awareness.” That last word is, like, almost comical
Lozada: Yes, because there is none.
Paul: There’s no self-awareness. And then of her first professional runway show, she says, “I felt a sense of calm confidence wash over me. I knew I was destined to do well at the big runway event on Friday night.” It’s like a memoir on Pinterest. [Lozada laughs.] The one place where I thought you got a hint of personality was how angry she was when first her caviar-infused skin care line didn’t get off the ground. And no specificity, but it was clearly not her fault.
Lozada: Melania Caviar Complexe C6, please. [Lozada laughs.]
Paul: Yes. And she has these slights that still stick with her. Gigs that they got after the 2020 election and set up and then nobody wanted to associate with their brand anymore. And so I think when you try to understand — which I’ve tried, and I’d love to hear your theories why she wrote this book — part of it, I think, is a branding exercise. She is trying to resurrect or create her own brand, and whether that means she wants a brand in case Donald Trump loses, in case they get divorced — that I don’t know.
The other possibilities that I could think of: Is this a fund-raising thing for the campaign? We know that she likes to create branded products. Was this an effort to sort of soften and round out Trump’s image before the election? Why did she wait until this moment to release this book?
Lozada: I mean, maybe they just got it done, right? Like, we can think that there’s like a deep, dark plan and a very sophisticated rollout decision why early October is the moment. And if that’s the case, I would think of two things: First, the main news that’s coming out of it — because there’s precious little news in anything else that’s in the book — is about Melania’s views on abortion.
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And you may be right that it could be an effort to sort of soften Donald Trump’s position on this, especially since people already think that he’s not really one of these hard-core, pro-life, anti-abortion politicians.
But you know, Occam’s razor. I think that if Donald Trump loses in November, there’s a lot less interest in Melania, a lot of people buying the book, buying her line of jewelry or whatever she’s selling on her website. And so this is the moment to strike while there’s still a lot of focus on Donald Trump.
And maybe this book will do really well. I haven’t seen sort of early figures.
Paul: It was No. 2 on Amazon, like, the weekend before it came out.
Lozada: Yes. But the thing about memoirs is that there are people who look into political memoirs, in part, for those big revelation moments, or we want to know what X person was thinking during this really controversial or difficult or complex or dangerous moment, right?
Paul: Right.
Lozada: But she skips over so many of those moments. If you go back and read Hillary Clinton’s memoirs, whether you buy them or not, she addresses the Monica Lewinsky moment when she was in the White House.
Paul: Yes.
Lozada: And what she felt like and how she couldn’t breathe and she was yelling. There’s no mention of “Access Hollywood,” of Stormy Daniels, of any sort of, like, “Here’s what I was actually thinking” —
Paul: Impeachment, E. Jean Carroll.
Lozada: — even to say that she thought it was all nonsense. She just skips. It’s an incredibly selective reading. Like birtherism. It’s kind of part of how Trump made his political name, and she dabbled in that as well. It’s just not there. None of this is there. It’s not that I wanted it to be a blow-by-blow of scandal, but I want some grappling with what we all know.
Paul: She really does not care a lot about politics. I imagine her sitting around, she is scrolling online, she is watching assorted TV shows, looking at home décor magazines. We get more about the redecoration of the White House than we do about anything that actually took place there.
Lozada: In fact, there’s a great moment, and that is on Jan. 6. Because what was she doing on Jan. 6? She had a team at the White House taking photographs of all the renovation projects they had done. And so she claims that she was so focused on that that she had no idea what was happening at the Capitol. That Donald is off doing whatever he was doing, and she had no idea that her press secretary reaches out by text and says, “Do you want to condemn the violence publicly?” as it’s going on. And that’s Stephanie Grisham, who goes unnamed in the memoir but who writes about this extensively in her memoir about this.
What Grisham writes in her memoir is that Melania just says one word: No. And how Grisham was really sort of shocked and troubled by this and then resigned. What Melania says in her memoir is that she had no idea what Grisham was talking about.
Paul: Right.
Lozada: It’s like: What violence? I always condemn violence if there’s violence. And then she says something very similar to what she said about the family separation policy. She said: No one briefed me on what was going on.
Paul: Right: It wasn’t my fault.
Lozada: I had no idea. I was looking at the renovation projects at the White House. Obviously, if I had known, I would have condemned the violence. And so it’s a remarkable way to sort of dispense with Jan. 6. She doesn’t at all pass any kind of judgment or even allusion to Donald Trump’s potential role in this event and instead just says: I didn’t know. It wasn’t me.
Paul: Yeah, there’s this remarkable kind of sense of detachment you get throughout the book.
I think what I gleaned from this book, most of all, is that Melania is very intentional about the way she comes across. That though she’s very private, everything that she puts out into the public eye must be impeccable, unique and sophisticated. And that is why the book is packaged this way, that’s why the language is the way it is.
So she does not acknowledge any sort of rough spots in any detail, any disagreements that she has with Donald. There’s no sense that you get of what her marriage is like, what is her parenting like, what was her childhood really like, because it is all portrayed not through rose-tinted glasses but, like, through rhinestone platinum glasses. Everything is perfect.
Lozada: Everything is perfect, and everything at the same time feels very opaque as a result.
Paul: Yes. There’s a flatness to this book.
Lozada: Her relationship with Donald Trump suffers from the same issues that all of her relationships do. She lists a series of qualities rather than giving you anything tangible to hold on to. The one moment that he does something specific is something that kind of freaked me out a little bit. She says this is how concerned he is of her: He will often call her private doctor to check on her health.
Paul: Oh, I thought that was so creepy!
Lozada: I thought that was really odd. [Lozada laughs.]
Paul: I was like, you know, it’s one thing if you are an aging couple and you want to make sure that your wife got the medication and you would go together to the appointment. But yeah, that was really —
Lozada: If I have sort of one takeaway: It’s that they’re kind of similar in that they’re all about appearances. They’re all about how they come across. When Trump talks about what he’s done, it was, like, the greatest economy in the world, the likes of which we’ve never seen. He was the biggest builder in New York. Everything is the biggest, is the best, and they live in this kind of self-described world of superlatives. Which may be part of why this marriage keeps on trucking.
Paul: Right. I think actually that’s exactly it. Like she had a nice time in the White House.
Lozada: She has remade the expectations people hold for the office of the first lady, for good or for ill.
Maybe the last thing I want to ask you about the book: I read a lot of political books for my job, and I’ve always felt that even when ghostwritten books are pretty wretched, maybe poorly written or take all these liberties, they still reveal something useful about the person, in part because they at least reveal how that person wishes to be perceived. In what sense are you glad this book exists?
Paul: Wow.
Lozada: If there is a sense.
Paul: I guess that it basically blows away any of the wishcasting that was going on with Melania, that secretly she was some deep and interesting person who thought about abortion a lot and or maybe had an abortion. There’s no dark story there in the abortion reveal.
I think that it obliterates those theories, and it shows Melania to be exactly what you expected her to be, which is a fashion model who is only nominally engaged with politics or with the world of her husband, Donald Trump.
Lozada: So people have said that the cover looks like a Chanel No. 5 ad, and I was thinking it could be like, “Melania: The scent of indifference.” [Paul laughs.] She just doesn’t really care.
Paul: She really doesn’t care. That was the perfect coat. She should wear it every day.
Lozada: [Lozada laughs.] Pamela, this was fun. Let’s read another book together.
Paul: Let’s read a better book next time.
Lozada: Be best with your books.
Paul: That’s right. Thanks, Carlos.
The post Two Opinion Columnists on Melania Trump’s Memoir appeared first on New York Times.